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“[Baucus] thinks we should not put our work on tax reform on hold until we have an agreement on how much revenue,” Neary said.

The uptick in private talks underscores how a bloc of Senate Republicans — including deal makers like Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bob Corker of Tennessee — has supplanted House Speaker John Boehner as the lone group that stands a chance of cutting an elusive deficit-cutting deal with the Obama administration.

Yet, as last week’s talks revealed, the two sides are nowhere near that point — in fact, they have yet to agree on what they believe are the fundamental drivers of the deficit.

The GOP senators who met with McDonough last week are an offshoot of the group that dined with Obama earlier this year, including at the Jefferson Hotel in March. Republicans have been quietly meeting among themselves since the two dinners and occasionally have looped McDonough into the talks.

At last week’s meeting, Johnson made a presentation to McDonough on behalf of Senate Republicans on how they view the deficit problem. And the GOP senators urged the White House to begin a public campaign, noting how entitlement programs — namely Medicare — need to be reformed as part of a larger deficit deal.

Rather than typical budgets that show 10-year windows, Johnson laid out government revenue and spending projections covering three decades. The Wisconsin Republican argued that using a 30-year window would depict a more accurate picture of the growth of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. One source pegged the budget gap growing from $70 trillion to $120 trillion over the next three decades, depending on the assumptions.

Republicans asked the White House how Obama’s final offer to Boehner during last winter’s fiscal cliff negotiations would fare under a 30-year budget window. That offer included a range of spending cuts, higher taxes and lower Social Security payments because of a change in how inflation is calculated.

“I think [the White House officials] were hoping for us to lay our solutions on the table — more looking to that as opposed to the definition of the problem,” Johnson acknowledged. “Let’s face it, the 10-year budget window is pretty favorable in terms of minimizing what kind of solutions we have to look at.”

“We have suggested to the chief of staff — [what] we need to do is to agree on the size of the problem,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) “The next step is for them to come back with a response.”

“We’re not negotiating anything; we are discussing,” said Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) “We are making progress on getting some understandings.”

From the Obama administration’s standpoint, Republicans want to make the fiscal problem look as dramatic as possible in order to increase pressure to overhaul entitlement programs. GOP lawmakers also don’t trust the White House, and they remain cautious about being outmaneuvered in any government shutdown or debt-limit showdown with Obama.

In addition, Obama has put some dramatic proposals on the table, including the use of the so-called chained CPI, which would slow the growth of entitlement programs. That move has angered liberal Democrats, but the White House has pointed to the proposal to argue it is serious about solving the long-term budget problems. Republicans, they say, have done nothing of the sort since the failure of the supercommittee talks in late 2011.

“It wasn’t a good meeting or a bad meeting,” said a source familiar with the meeting.

The source added: “The status quo is not going to be acceptable to us.”